It’s happened to us all: You have mission critical content that is delivered from, served on, uploaded to or otherwise dependent on a third party web app/site and the provider is bricked… right when you need it most.
Ouch!
It happened to us just last week; for reasons we still don’t understand, our Facebook page was out. The most important piece of internet real estate in our quiver was down.
Now, if this was OUR website on OUR server we would simply revert to the backup on another server and point the domain to it and we would be back up in minutes.
But no, our fate was in the hands of a third party that we don’t pay and that we, for the most part, cannot contact. Our page was down for 10 days straight. We still don’t know why it was down or why it came back up, but we are thinking about contingency plans for if when it happens again.
We want to hear about your ‘Third Party Nightmare so we can learn from each other, ‘cuz if you haven’t had a third party nightmare, just wait…it’s coming.
Let’s here ’em.
Stacey says
That’s a no-brainer for me. Anytime Google Apps (specifically Gmail) locks up, most people act like the Rapture came and they missed it!
The good news is that Gmail rarely goes down *entirely*. Usually, you can still access your mail messages via IMAP clients, just not the web interface.
Brian Barela says
gmail was hacked this week! was close to comatose the entire day trying to get it back on. thankfully a friend of a friend had connections at google.
good reminder to make sure data is captured on my own server/disk…